s the door, so as to ascertain what might be the meaning of this
disquieting darkness and silence. The door proved to be half open. One
of the conspirators thereupon popped his head in, but quickly withdrew
it, announcing that there was a man under the porch, sitting against the
wall fast asleep, with a gun between his legs. Rougon, seeing a chance
of commencing with a deed of valour, thereupon entered first, and,
seizing the man, held him down while Roudier gagged him. This first
triumph, gained in silence, singularly emboldened the little troop, who
had dreamed of a murderous fusillade. And Rougon had to make imperious
signs to restrain his soldiers from indulging in over-boisterous
delight.

They continued their advance on tip-toes. Then, on the left, in the
police guard-room, which was situated there, they perceived some fifteen
men lying on camp-beds and snoring, amid the dim glimmer of a lantern
hanging from the wall. Rougon, who was decidedly becoming a great
general, left half of his men in front of the guard-room with orders not
to rouse the sleepers, but to watch them and make them prisoners if they
stirred. He was personally uneasy about the lighted window which they
had seen from the square. He still scented Macquart's hand in the
business, and, as he felt that he would first have to make prisoners of
those who were watching upstairs, he was not sorry to be able to adopt
surprise tactics before the noise of a conflict should impel them to
barricade themselves in the first-floor rooms. So he went up quietly,
followed by the twenty heroes whom he still had at his disposal. Roudier
commanded the detachment remaining in the courtyard.

As Rougon had surmised, it was Macquart who was comfortably installed
upstairs in the mayor's office. He sat in the mayor's arm-chair,
with his elbows on the mayor's writing-table. With the characteristic
confidence of a man of coarse intellect, who is absorbed by a fixed idea
and bent upon his own triumph, he had imagined after the departure of
the insurgents that Plassans was now at his complete disposal, and that
he would be able to act there like a conqueror. In his opinion that
body of three thousand men who had just passed through the town was
an invincible army, whose mere proximity would suffice to keep the
bourgeois humble and docile in his hands. The insurgents had imprisoned
the gendarmes in their barracks, the National Guard was already
dismembered, the nobility must